Lydia Cortes & Mendi and Keith Obadike December 10, 2007

Lydia Cortes, originally a Puerto Rican Brooklynite, also lived in Rome, Italy. Manhattan is home now for more than 30 years. She was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship; a NEA Fellowship for The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; a residency in Spain at Fundacion Valparaiso and a Jerome Foundation grant. Her story, Home Cookin’ is included in the anthology, Through the Kitchen Window, a poem in the anthology Teaching with Fire; an essay in the anthology In Praise of Teachers and a play in Monologues from the Road. Her work has also appeared in The New York News Sunday and Urban Latino magazines among other venues. The title of her collection of poetry is Lust for Lust. Three of her poems appear in Boriquen to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium, edited by Roberto Marquez. She also has an unpublished story collection, Park Avenue, Brooklyn, about a Puerto Rican child and her family in the 1950’s neighborhood of Williamsburg. Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature. Their projects have been featured on radio stations (including WBAI-NY, WHUR-DC and WNYC), in periodicals (including Art Journal, Artthrob, Meridians, New Music Box, Black Arts Quarterly, Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Tema Celeste), and survey texts including New Media Art (Taschen) and Internet Art (Thames and Hudson). A series of Mendi and Keith’s media works are featured in the recent anthology Re: skin a(M.I.T. Press). Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is an assistant professor in the College Arts and Communication at William Paterson University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University. She is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.